Shaggy passed up the opportunity to be featured on Rihanna’s 9th studio album.

In an interview with Daily Star, Shaggy said that he passed on the chance to be featured on Rih’s new album because he didn’t want to audition.

“They approached me for the Rihanna project, yeah. There’s a lot of great people involved, but for me, I didn’t need to audition to be on the record. I’ll leave that to younger guys. But from what I hear, it should be good,” he said.

Although he passed on joining the project, Shaggy says he completely supports Rihanna’s shift into dancehall.

“It’s healthy competition. Dancehall is in good place but we need as many people to do this art form as possible,” he continued. “When it crosses over and becomes popular with artists from other genres and other cultures, that can only be good.”

New details surrounding Rihanna’s new album have yet to be revealed. An anonymous source told Rolling Stone, that the album would only be 10 songs. “[Rihanna’s team] have, no lie, 500 records for this project [from] different producers and writers. They’re only choosing 10 records. They’ve been having writing camps and trying to keep them quiet for almost a year and a half now. I’ve been flying to Miami, flying to L.A., cutting records nonstop for this project.”

For the past few weeks Rih has been teasing her fans about the album. In December, she took to Instagram to troll her fans and say that she is refusing to release it. The post is a video of a cute puppy excitedly hopping around inside a cardboard box, set to the House of Pain song “Jump Around.” She captioned the video, “update: me listening to R9 by myself and refusing to release it.”

In 2018, a fan asked Rihanna on Instagram when she would release her album. The singer replied, “2019” however, the album never dropped.